With less human involvement, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) connects billions of heterogeneous and self-organized smart sensors and devices. Recently, IIoT-based technologies are now widely employed to enhance the user experience across numerous application domains. However, heterogeneity in the node source poses security concerns affecting the IIoT system, and due to device vulnerabilities, IIoT has encountered several attacks. Therefore, security features, such as encryption, authorization control, and verification, have been applied in IIoT networks to secure network nodes and devices. However, the requisite machine learning models require some time to detect assaults because of the diverse IIoT network traffic properties. Therefore, this study proposes ensemble models enabled with a feature selection classifier for Intrusion Detection in the IIoT network. The Chi-Square Statistical method was used for feature selection, and various ensemble classifiers, such as eXtreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), Bagging, extra trees (ET), random forest (RF), and AdaBoost can be used for the detection of intrusion applied to the Telemetry data of the TON_IoT datasets. The performance of these models is appraised based on accuracy, recall, precision, F1-score, and confusion matrix. The results indicate that the XGBoost ensemble showed superior performance with the highest accuracy over other models across the datasets in detecting and classifying IIoT attacks.

The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) has witnessed immense growth globally with the use of various devices found in home, transportation, healthcare, and industry. The deployment and implementation of the IoT paradigm in industrial settings lead to the architectural changes of Industrial Automation and Control Systems (IACS) plus the countless connectivity of industrial systems. This resulted in what is referred to as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), which removes the barrier of connecting IACS to isolated conventional ICT platforms. In recent times, the IoT has started hacking our personal lives and not only our world, thus creating a platform for impending IoT cyberattacks. The widespread use of the IoT has created a rich platform for possible IoT cyberattacks. Machine learning (ML) algorithms have been driven solutions to secure wireless communication in IIoT-based systems, and their use in solving various cybersecurity challenges. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel intrusion detection model based on the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Bat algorithm (BA) for feature selection, and the Random Forest (RF) classifier for the classification of malicious behaviors in IIoT-based network traffic. An IIoT-based cybersecurity dataset, WUSTL-IIOT-2021 Dataset, was used to evaluate the performance of the proposed model using accuracy, recall, precision, and F1-score. The results of the two feature selection were compared to identify the most promising one. The results were compared with other recent state-of-the-art ML and multiobjective algorithms, and the results showed better performance. The RF along with BA classifier had proved to be the best classifier.